Monday, March 05, 2012

It's a known pattern in American English, often identified with the Upper Midwest but certainly found far and wide beyond it, that verbs of motion (like go, come, ride) can occur with with as what many would regard as a verbal particle. In other words, you get sentences like this:

We're going to the store. Wanna come with?

How far this pattern extends is something that folks here in Wisconsin have been wondering about. For instance, speakers give different reactions to something like this:

I'm calling from the park.
Oh, are the kids with?

This weekend, the missus and me heard a native Wisconsinite use something I hadn't heard before, namely:

Just a father taking a child on a trip and the mother not with.

I've only talked to one native speaker of Upper Midwestern English about this, and their response was 'I don't think I can get that.'

First one I say all the time. Second one I would tell my linguist friends about. Third one I wouldn't say, but wouldn't notice. I would say "Just a father taking a child on a trip and not (taking) the mother with." But, then again, I am from Wisconsin.

@Chris: Yes, this is likely connected to the pattern in the Germanic languages of having such verb-particle constructions. In Wisconsin, German would have played a role, but there were lots of Norwegians, Dutch and other speakers with this in their languages and it's really just an extension of an extant pattern of verb particles patterns, a really specific one.

I'm from west-central Wisconsin, and I think it's more common in north-eastern Wisconsin, where I live now. That would argue for the German hypothesis. (It seems to me it's concentrated in Southern Door and Eastern Brown County, but that may be a coincidence of the people I happen to know)

This is a good question for further research. I know that there's work on this going on at UW-Eau Claire. There's also a nice dissertation on the topic:

Spartz, John M. 2008. Do you want to come with?: A cross-dialectal, multi-field, variationist investigation of with as particle selected by motion verbs in the Minnesota dialect of English. Doctoral dissertation, Purdue University.

My sense is that the simple 'come with' is pretty widespread across Wisconsin, but that things that more directly reflect German patterns ('come here once', for instance) ARE more robust in eastern Wisconsin, where German immigrant was heaviest.

At first it seemed off to me, but I said it aloud a couple times, and with a certain intonation, it works. But it feels like a very old construction to me. Something I might have heard my great aunts (Illinois near the Wisconsin border) say.

The usual way I hear (and use) this, Chicagoan born and bred as I am, is 'If you're going, I'm coming with.' And my understanding has always been that it's an echo of the German construction, following from the large numbers of German settlers in the Midwest.

And by the way -- only vaguely related -- while I was in northern Iowa a couple weeks ago I heard 'uff da' more than once.